"I can't think--if you really want to know--what she may _not_ offer!"
"In the manner of princesses, who do such things?"
"In any manner you like. So be prepared."
Well, he looked as if he almost were. "It will be for me then to
accept. But that's the way it must come."
Kate's silence, so far, let it pass; but she presently said: "You'll,
on your honour, stay then?"
His answer made her wait, but when it came it was distinct. "Without
you, you mean?"
"Without us."
"And you yourselves go at latest--?"
"Not later than Thursday."
It made three days. "Well," he said, "I'll stay, on my honour, if
you'll come to me. On your honour."
Again, as before, this made her momentarily rigid, with a rigour out of
which, at a loss, she vaguely cast about her. Her rigour was more to
him, nevertheless, than all her readiness; for her readiness was the
woman herself, and this other thing a mask, a stop-gap and a "dodge."
She cast about, however, as happened, and not for the instant in vain.
Her eyes, turned over the room, caught at a pretext. "Lady Wells is
tired of waiting: she's coming--see--to _us_."
Densher saw in fact, but there was a distance for their visitor to
cross, and he still had time. "If you decline to understand me I wholly
decline to understand you. I'll do nothing."
"Nothing?" It was as if she tried for the minute to plead.
"I'll do nothing. I'll go off before you. I'll go to-morrow."
He was to have afterwards the sense of her having then, as the phrase
was--and for vulgar triumphs too--seen he meant it. She looked again at
Lady Wells, who was nearer, but she quickly came back. "And if I do
understand?"
"I'll do everything."
She found anew a pretext in her approaching friend: he was fairly
playing with her pride. He had never, he then knew, tasted, in all his
relation with her, of anything so sharp--too sharp for mere
sweetness--as the vividness with which he saw himself master in the
conflict. "Well, I understand."
"On your honour?"
"On my honour."
"You'll come?"
"I'll come."